A Friendly Little Tavern Somewhere Near the Pleiades

<p>Buff Whitman-Bradley is a poet of life's little moments of nature and in earlier volumes of political poems that rage with compassion. One of his previous collections <em>At the Driveway Guitar Sale: Poems on Aging Memory Mortality </em>is a book of swan songs but songs from a swan that isn't much interested in pathos whining or tragedy. This swan shrugs its extravagant wings at mortality and sings its songs with grace wit economy a perfect ear and understated profundity. In this new volume the poet continues making us laugh and sigh and sometimes gasp in astonishment with his melancholy ecstatic imaginative philosophical and utterly charming poems about life age (old and young) nature the theological debates of ants the nectar-besotted revelries of bees whimsically imagined after-lives and the poet's own glee at his little granddaughter's assessment of him: He's a good guy/but he's really slow.</p><p></p><p>`-<strong>Phineas Stolyavitch</strong></p><p></p><p></p>